William Butler Yeats: the Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, was both born and educated in Dublin Ireland; he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature in 1933. One of his most famous poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” was written early in his career as a poet. In the poem, Yeats takes the reader to a small island away from the chaos of everyday life, an island where the poet imagines he will go to live independently. The reader is transported, with the poet, to a place far away from schedules, deadlines, and stress. Yeats uses alliteration, end rhymes, and other poetic strategies to transport the reader to his imaginary getaway: the Isle of Innisfree. One technique Yeats uses in his poem is anaphora. In the first line of the poem Yeats writes, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” Yeats repeats the word “go”, stressing the fact that he really wants to “go” to his imaginary world: Innisfree. Yeats includes a caesura to develop the feelings of wanting to escape to Innisfree and to emphasis the faults in everyday society. He adds the caesura after the phrase, “I will arise and go now.” He put this unnatural stop there to enhance how he feels about going to Innisfree. This determination of leaving this world reflects the problems of the society that humankind has. All these troubles cause people in our society to think about an ideal place; we don’t appreciate our real lives; we would rather live or dream about a perfect for you. This idea is reflected in Yeats’ poem. Another technique Yeats uses is alliteration. One example of alliteration in the poem is when Yeats writes, “and I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.” This line refers to going to Innisfree and escaping the outside world and its pressures. The narrator is searching for peace and hopes to enjoy his life slowly without it rushing past him. He uses the “s” and “c” sounds in “some” and “peace” to stress this point:...

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...﻿Introduction:
The poem I chose was “The LakeIsle of Innisfree” by WilliamButlerYeats, and the song I chose was “Pocket Full of Sunshine” by Natasha Bedingfield. A harmony with nature and peace is the main focus of these diverse works.
WilliamYeats Background Information
-Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism and philosophy.
-An abundance of his poems included the setting of his homeland, Ireland.
-As an adult, Yeats often yearned for and desired the quiet life in Sligo. His carefree child-life experience in this serene environment inspired him to write "The LakeIsle of Innisfree."
Theme Statement
- One may often desire a simplistic way of life and aspire to reach harmony with nature in order to escape the chaos of modern society.
Summary of “The LakeIsle of Innisfree”
-The speaker, which we infer to be Butler, says he is going to “Innisfree”, whichis a place in West Ireland. Yeats didn't invent it - but his creation made this setting more whimsical and made it seem immortal.
-He adventures to this magical place to build a simple, quaint cabin where he will have a bean garden and honeybee hive.
-The purpose of this trip is to reach a state of peace. He is drawn to the...

...WilliamButlerYeats
The LakeIsle of Innisfree
“The LakeIsle of Innisfree” is a modernist poem published in Yeats’s second volume of poetry, entitled “The Rose” (1893) and, although simple in form and imagery, it has managed to earn its place as one of his great literary achievements and one of his most enduring. The poem represents a nostalgic description of a concrete, geographical place, the lakeisle of Innisfree, which the poet manages to transform into a magical landscape, full of symbols and beautiful elements of nature.
The imagery of the poem creates an atmosphere of melancholy, due to the many references to a faraway, idyllic place, but also a feeling of hope and serenity, because of the speaker’s certainty that this isle, this wonderful part of nature, is the best escape from the stress and agitation of the every day life in the city.
The poem represents the speaker’s recollection of an excursion in the middle of a wild, uncorrupted corner of the world and manages to embark the readers on the same boat with him, determining them to leave behind every aspect of daily life and allow oneself to dream of this kind of special place every once in a while.
The isle is presented as a place of refuge, of calm...

...The LakeIsle of Innisfree.
Poet: W.B. Yeats
Topic: Nature
Theme: The main theme of this poem is the poets longing to return to the beautiful isle of Innisfree and to live in harmony with nature.
Subject Matter: At the time, Yeats was living in London. He was tired of the hustle and bustle of city life and longed to return to Sligo where he could live close to nature. In the opening line of the poem he sets out his intention to return. He envisages clearing some tress and building a hut from traditional sources. "Clay and wattles made," He intends to be self-sufficient, "Nine bean rows I will have there, a hive for the honey bee." He looks forward to the peace he will experience there, in sharp contrast to the noise of London. He describes the sights, sounds and colors which he will experience. In the final verse, he repeats his determination to return to Innisfree. In his mind, he thinks he can hear the lake watter "lapping on the shore." It is a part of him. "I hear it in the deep heart's core." He must return to experience this in reality.
Language and Style: The poem is made up of three four line verses with line one rhyming with line three and line two with line four. It is very rich in sound. Along with rhyme, there are numerous examples of alliteration. "A hive for the honey bee" Assonance is also present. "Clay and wattles made."...

...THE LAKEISLE OF INNISFREE
By WilliamButlerYeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
1892
WilliamButlerYeats' poem "The LakeIsle of Innisfree" describes a sort of utopia that the narrator wishes to escape to. He wishes to leave the city and go to a remote place where life is simple, the beauty of mother-nature all around. It is a place where one lives off of the land, so consumerism doesn't exist. Yeats wrote this poem after passing a display on Fleet Street in London. Yeats writes in his autobiography "I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree...and when walking through...

...In W.B. Yeats’s “The LakeIsle of Innisfree,” the poet describes Innisfree as a sanctuary. It is a place where the speaker will find peace. The poet paints a picture of this safe haven where one can escape the mundane world. It is a utopic island where one can find solace away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Innisfree has such a strong effect that it goes to the core of the speaker.
The poem is organized into three quatrains. The rhyme scheme is a,b,a,b, and Yeats uses masculine rhymes. This aids in the creation of the lilting tone that Yeats utilizes throughout the poem. The reader can almost hear the slow and steady flow of the “lake water lapping” on shore and feel the sense of peacefulness, which Yeats describes in such detail in the poem, (10).
The speaker will rise to go to a “small cabin” on Innisfree where rows of beans will grow and honeybees will be raised. The speaker will live alone in a cabin listening to “the bee-loud glade,” (4). The speaker goes to this place for peace which “comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings,” (5-6). On the LakeIsle of Innisfree, the “midnight’s all a glimmer,” as the moon reflects off the water, and the “noon a purple glow,” as the sun shines on the water, (7). Whether it is night or day or...

...﻿“WilliamButlerYeats deals with an interesting variety of subjects and his poetry is full of powerful images and impressive descriptions. Discuss.”
Submitted by Hollie McLaughlin.
I very much enjoy reading the poetry of WilliamButlerYeats. What I like about the poetry is the multi-faceted man who emerges. In Inisfree he is the searching, restless 25 year old, looking to nature as a kind of redemptive force. In ‘September 1913’ he is the ardent political critic of the soul-destroying materialism. In ‘Easter 1916’ he is again many-sided, the man who commemorates the great heroes and is able to confess he was wrong about their existence, as well as the man painfully aware of war’s wastage of youthful potential. My favourite, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, is Yeats as the disillusioned man whose “heart is sore”, the man of “unrequited love”, the man aware of mortality. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats symbolises universal man in search of meaning and permanence amid the transience of life. Who couldn’t be intrigued by this man!
In ‘The LakeIsle of Inisfree’, Yeats echoes for me, the longing we all experience at times to escape the urban jungle, the “pavements grey”. This grim image of oppression is something many people have to face worldwide. A frequent reoccurrence in the poetry of...

...The Style and Content of WilliamButlerYeatsWilliamButlerYeats was a man who is known for his extraordinary writings of the nineteenth century, and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the English language. Yeats was a poet with extensive knowledge and was thought to have been born ahead of his time. Throughout his poetry and literary works he uses a combination of technique and style to express his meaningful ideas. Yeats became a pioneering poet who had a revolutionary type of style and content throughout all of his works. In these analyzed poems, Yeats demonstrates how he is authentically unique, through his innovative utilization of style and content.
In the different stages of WilliamButlerYeats' life, the subject matter of his poems changes as if they were phases. During the beginning stage of his life he had many poetic themes that displayed; romantic, dreamy, escapist, and anti-Victorian subjects and content matter (Anne Mary 1st). Yeats displays some of these themes in one of his earlier poems called "When You Are Old," where he uses a dreamy type of nostalgic premise to the poem. In this poem Yeats describes a woman who is in the future reminiscing over her unforgotten pastimes. The main theme of this somber poem is a depressing one about...

...Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats's father, John ButlerYeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally, Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland's predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed, he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics, because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats's best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant—the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan than Christian.
In 1867, when Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents. This country—its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats's...